After Liberalism: Notes toward Reconstruction
Serious discussions of politics today, especially in the academy, routinely presume that liberalism is inevitable, the only tolerable form of political society available in the modern world. For that reason, fundamental objections to liberalism are considered pointless. Critics are told they must choose between irritable complaints that go nowhere and trying to restrain or moderate liberalism while nevertheless accepting its basic premises.
The reason, as John Rawls and others have emphasized, is pluralism. Prosperity, urban living, easy communication, mass mobility, and widespread advanced education mean that people go their own way for their own reasons. The result is that consensus regarding goods that society might pursue in common is not possible, now or in any foreseeable future. To base government on a specific view of the good would mean suppressing thought and discussion, and forcing people to live in ways they reject for reasons they consider fundamental. Such an effort would be at odds with how modern society works, and people would not stand for such “injustice.”
The lessons of history are said to buttress this view, supporting what Judith Shklar called “the liberalism of fear.” The premodern West was violent and oppressive because public life was tied to religious issues that could not be resolved; we have gotten beyond the violence by avoiding the issues. We have been able to do so, it is said, because agreement on the right and just is possible without reference to ultimate goods: it is right to treat everyone equally, and just to pay equal regard to their various goals.
It is also thought, in line with the modern technological outlook, that social order is a human construction that can be perpetually remodeled to bring it ever more into conformity with what is right, just, and rational. The conclusion, which is basic to today’s public life, is that government should intervene continuously in social life to put everyone more and more in a position to get what he wants, as much and as equally as possible. Such an approach gives each of us all that is possible without slighting others. The result is that no one has legitimate grounds for complaint, and a social decision as to the good is unnecessary.
To educated and responsible people today this line of argument seems unanswerable. Nonetheless, there are basic problems with it that make the indefinite continuance of liberal government doubtful and that open up possibilities for a different approach to politics.
Liberalism and the Good
The problems go to the most basic claims and concepts. “The good” is simply whatever it is that makes a goal rational to choose. It follows that liberal governments are based on a definite theory of the good, that it is at bottom a matter of satisfying preferences. That theory is as contestable as any other. Some believe it makes sense; others, who find goals such as virtue or human flourishing more reasonable, do not.
Most of the great thinkers of the past, and most people who are neither economists nor rigorous liberals today, reject preference satisfaction as a supreme goal. Those who affirm some other conception of the good naturally want to bring their view of the matter into public discussions. It is hardly conciliatory to tell them that their thoughts on such an important issue are mere private opinions with no legitimate role in public decisions.
To make matters worse for liberal claims of neutrality, the exclusion of substantive views of the good from the public sphere appears to result, at least as a practical matter, from a view of ultimate issues that has itself come to be treated as authoritative. Crudely expressed, that view identifies reality with atoms, the void, and human subjectivity; knowledge with modern natural science; and rational action with technology, the rational use of available resources to satisfy human preferences. Because all preferences are equally preferences, and there are no higher goods that allow us to judge one better than another, all have an equal claim to fulfillment. Maximum equal preference satisfaction thus becomes the uniquely rational guide for ordering society.
As the supreme guide to a just social order, that principle of maximum equal satisfaction is considered worthy of a loyalty that trumps all others. For that reason it naturally receives a quasi-religious interpretation, one that sanctifies individual feelings and purposes as the source and goal of all value. Such an outlook has become the criterion for what amounts to a public religious orthodoxy: liberal religion, which affirms the equal dignity of values, is good and beneficial; antiliberal religion, which proposes a substantive higher standard, is dangerous and oppressive.
Despite claims to the contrary, it thus turns out that contemporary Western government can be identified with a particular view of ultimate and even religious issues. There is nothing surprising in that result. As Kenneth Craycraft and others have noted, religious neutrality is a myth. Basic social institutions inevitably claim the right to make decisions on matters of life and death, and to demand sacrifice—even extreme sacrifice—of personal interests. To do so, they must be seen as grounded in ultimate realities regarding the meaning and value of life, and thus correspond to an authoritative religious outlook.
In any event, it is less a government’s conception of the good that makes it tolerant than its willingness to put up with other conceptions. In that regard there is nothing intrinsically tolerant about liberalism. To the contrary, liberalism is an evolving outlook based on abstractions whose demands expand without limit. In practice it tries to root out one illiberal arrangement after another, and becomes more and more intolerant of competing views and practices. A nonliberal government that views, say, Christian virtue as the ultimate goal of social order will try to facilitate it in various ways, but it is also likely to accept that virtue cannot be coerced, and so adopt a laissez-faire attitude in many respects. A liberal government that aims at equal preference satisfaction and that takes a technological approach to the social order is likely to notice that people inconvenience each other in ways that are unjust by its standards and conclude that a comprehensive system of politically correct supervision, indoctrination, and control is needed to keep them from doing so. Which government will be more tolerant in practice?
Present-day Western governments conduct all the normal activities of traditional, preliberal governments, and then some. They confer honors, establish holidays, educate the young, determine family law, support people in their troubles, define crimes and determine how serious they are, spend a very large part of the national income, and try to reshape institutions, attitudes, and personal relationships in the interest of what they believe to be just. How could such a comprehensive scheme of activity possibly be rational without an overall view of what to promote and what to curtail? If the sole purpose of these efforts, which pervade all aspects of life, is maximization of equal freedom, without regard to the effect on other goods, the efforts are fanatical. Why is fanaticism in the name of freedom and equality better than fanaticism in the name of virtue or God’s will?
In fact, the advance of liberalism increasingly undermines older liberal principles such as freedom of opinion and even freedom of conscience. Western governments need popular support, but they insist on liberal goals as determined by experts. To satisfy both needs, they inevitably try to mold popular attitudes in favor of goals already determined to be correct. They have a variety of means to do so. Those means emphasize education and supervision of organizational life in the interests of equality but increasingly include direct use of coercion. In much of the West, the coercion amounts to enforcement of a new law of blasphemy and heresy, while in America the Obama administration recently ruled that religious institutions will have no exemption from a requirement to provide health-care coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. Those that fail to comply will be subject to a $2,000 fine for every employee. So the University of Notre Dame, with about five thousand employees, now faces a choice between violating its Catholic conscience and paying a $10 million fine each year.
Read the complete article in First Principles
Russell Kirk on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, by Robert M. Woods
In all of our Great Books based programs we exalt the primary readings, unmediated by commentaries, critical theories, jargon ladened treatises, and a mountain of secondary works explaining what a given author meant within his work. What we generally do is encourage the students to jump right in and start swimming. By asking interpretive questions and applying the Socratic method of clarifying and qualifying, the student has better understanding of the reading. Of course, we all know that sometimes answers to our questions about a reading are not to be found within the work and sometimes we need additional outside, background materials to assist a fuller reading. Typically, our students read introductions at the end and not the beginning.
All this is stated to provide the exceptions. Sometimes there are those writings about the Great Books that offer such assistance and are so rich with insight that the secondary work in conversation with the primary work comes a work well worth reading and analysis. One could immediately think of T.S. Eliot’s reflections on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Another would be Russell Kirk’s ruminations on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative